Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  He woke from sweet sleep to the realization of why he had dreamed about the superchimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds. So was he. As a chimp is to a human, Falcon was to some as-yet-to-be-perfected machine.

  He had found his role at last. He alone could travel unprotected on the surface of the Moon, or Mercury, or a dozen other worlds. The life-support system inside the titanium-aluminide cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or underwater. Gravity fields even ten times that of Earth would be an inconvenience, nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.

  The human race was becoming more remote, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right to live outside atmosphere. Perhaps they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, the moon, Mars.

  Some day the real masters of space would be machines, not men. He was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation.

  The hidden, intricate sequence of directives which supposedly had been programmed into Falcon’s mind and which the mere incantation of the words “Prime Directive” had been intended to activate in him had failed to work as his designers intended—not simply because of mechanical failure, and certainly not because Falcon was less than human—but because he was still, in some essential, deep crevice of his mind, too human to do what no human would do, sacrifice himself for no good reason.

  Falcon himself knew nothing of this. He did not know that his instincts for self-preservation—with a little help from electrical overload—had crushed the best hopes of a millenniums-old religious conspiracy. He knew only that he had been elected.

  He would, after all, be an ambassador—between the old and the new, between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of ceramic and metal who must one day supersede them. He was sure that both species would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.

  EPILOGUE

  “Another?”

  “Why yes, very good of you…” Professor J. Q. R. Forster positioned his glass under the neck of the Laphroaig bottle. The commander poured the dark liquid over chunk of ice. Behind them, an oak fire burned with intense heat in the fireplace of the Granite Lodge library. Outside the tall windows, the early winter sun was setting.

  “The ignition sequence was keyed to mission-elapsed time,” the commander said, replacing the bottle on the silver tray. “If the count had continued, Troy’s rewrite of the program would have sent Kon-Tiki straight into Jupiter. Half an hour before that could happen, Falcon manually overrode the sequencer to escape from the medusa.”

  “So the medusa actually saved his life!” Forster’s terrier brows leaped eagerly upon his forehead—he loved a good yarn.

  “And Troy’s freedom. She would have been guilty of murder.”

  Forster shrugged, faintly embarrassed. “In that unfortunate event, surely she could have pled temporary insanity.”

  “Not something she likes to talk about.” The commander settled into his armchair, remembering the recent trip from Jupiter. He was not about to burden Forster with the details—details that would remain vivid in his own mind for years.

  “You can’t save me from a murder charge that easily,” Linda had rasped at him for the hundredth time, her eyes dull with weariness. “I killed Holly Singh. And Jack Noble. And the orange man. Maybe others. When I did it, I knew what I was doing.”

  One of the swiftest ships in the solar system was taking three weeks to get them back to Earth. It gave her the time she needed to recover her physical health. It gave all of them more time than they needed for debate and discussion.

  But Linda was an infinite puzzle to the commander. “Does your conscience require that much of you?” he had asked her.

  “You are asking me if I can find any reason to justify the murders I committed. I tell you no, none—even though those people tried to murder me. And may have murdered my parents, whatever you or I want to believe.”

  “The ones you named were murderers, all right. And they meant to enslave humanity. Others like them survive, with goals that haven’t changed.”

  “That doesn’t justify killing them in cold blood.” Her blood had not been cold, though. It had teemed.

  “Well, you’re determined.” He sighed expressively. “Whether you knew what you were doing is not something you’re going to be left to decide for yourself, I’m afraid. Psychiatric observation is all your uncorroborated confession is likely to get you.”

  “Uncorroborated?”

  He pretended not to hear her. “And after some indeterminate sentence in a mental hospital—you know what that’s like, I think, the sort of things they can do these days with programmed nanochips and so on—after that, if there’s any evidence to support your statement, maybe they’ll lock you in a penitentiary for life. But if that’s what you want…”

  “You know I’m telling the truth.”

  “Maybe. No one has reported any of those people dead, or even missing.”

  “But has anyone seen them? They were public figures, some of them. Lord Kingman. Holly Singh.”

  “No, but Jack Noble had already taken a powder, as they used to say. ’Course, he had cause.” He shrugged. “People can disappear for years at a time for no good reason, maybe because they just feel like it. You vanished without warning, Linda. More than once.”

  She winced to hear her name from his lips.

  “But let’s say I believe they are dead and that you killed them—leaving out Kingman, of course. Do you want my cooperation? Want me to help you take on all the responsibility, let you pay for your mortal sins?”

  “What do you want?” She swallowed, anticipating the barb in the bait.

  “Help us.” Those smooth-talking Jesuit confessors, the childless uncles and cousins of his French Canadian forebears, would have been proud of him—weren’t they just as at home with the sophistries of the cloister as with the lies they told the Indians they’d come to convert?—but the commander was ashamed of himself. “We’ve got a problem. Bigger than your little personal problem. Maybe even bigger than Homo sapiens.”

  “Just because you try to make it sound important doesn’t let me off the hook.”

  “Stay on your damned hook. You hit some of the Free Spirit, but it wasn’t a clean hit. Who the hell taught you to try to hit anything with a handgun at five hundred meters?”—he was angry, filled with professional scorn—“Yeah, we did wreck their plans on Jupiter, without your help, but we haven’t cleaned them out. Laird, or Lequeu, or whatever he calls himself, is still loose.”

  “He can’t do anything. The creatures in the clouds have spoken.”

  The commander’s eye brightened. “Do you claim to interpret this revelation for us? For me, who knows the Knowledge almost as well as you?”

  “You don’t know what they said.” Sparta grimaced. “Don’t try to make a fool of me.”

  “The medusas had something to say, though.”

  “Something, yes.”

  “What was that? Is the Pancreator coming for us now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, huskily, dropping her glance. “I no longer have organs to hear.”

  “If they are coming for us, it could be the oldest problem of all, Linda. Down here in the slaughterhouse, could be sheep against goats.” His smile was bleak. “Always thought goats were a hell of a lot more charming than sheep. Maybe that puts me on the wrong side.”

  “You make me small,” she whispered. “I am not small.”

  He got angry then. “You make yourself small—if you will not fight for the right of free human beings to hear this so-called revelation! You can’t keep it to yourself, any more than Laird and his phony prophets could keep it to themselves.”

  She ducked her head—a gesture of shame she had recently acquired—before she looked up at him, still defi
ant. In the end, his best Jesuitical arguments had failed to move her.

  But he didn’t need to tell that to Forster.

  The commander found himself staring into the searing embers of the crumbling oakwood fire. He looked up at the eager little professor. “End of my story, I’m afraid.”

  “Ahh—and now for mine,” said Forster, leaning forward in the overstuffed armchair, making the leather squeak. A look of pure glee stretched his disturbingly youthful face. “I’ve analyzed the material you provided.”

  “So you said.”

  The professor couldn’t resist a moment of pure pedagogy. “It is worth noting that the Medusa—the Gorgon’s head—is an ancient symbol of stewardship. The shield and guardian of wisdom.”

  “Yeah, I think I heard that somewhere before.”

  “The recordings of the transmissions of the ring of medusas were easily deciphered—relatively easily, after a bit of play with SETI analysis programs—and according to the linguistic system I had previously outlined for you and Mr. Redfield, I determined that the transmissions were definitely signals, and most definitely in the language of Culture X.”

  “Professor, if you would just…”

  “And they signify”—Forster drew out his words, almost crooning them—“They have arrived.”

  “They have arrived?”

  “Yes. That’s the message: ‘They have arrived.’”

  Was Forster playing a joke? “I don’t believe it,” the commander said. “Those things were beaming straight at Kon-Tiki’s mission control. Why would they…?”

  “Why tell those who had just arrived that they had arrived?” Forster chuckled. “Good question. Especially since the medusas hardly seem to be intelligent creatures in any sense that we understand the word—perhaps no more intelligent than trained parrots. Likely they were responding to some stimulus planted eons ago. Even coded in whatever serves them for genes.”

  “But why aim at Mission Control?”

  “I think it unlikely their message was intended for Mission Control. I believe they were aiming elsewhere.”

  “Forster…”

  “Thanks to your good offices, Commander, my survey of the moon Amalthea has already been given a firm launch date.” Forster peered into his newly empty glass.

  “Let me freshen that,” said the commander, leaning forward. He took the heavy silver tongs and lifted ice cubes from the bucket and dropped them ringing into Forster’s glass. He reached for the whiskey bottle. “Amalthea, you say…”

  The sun had set beyond the western cliffs, sucking the color into the matte gray forested hills across the river. Lights came on, dim yellow bulbs hidden in crevices of the low stone wall beside the river cliffs. Blake and Sparta walked beside the wall, their boots rustling the dead leaves. Cold air moved heavily against their backs, the breath of winter sliding down the valley from the high ground. Both were hunched against the cold, hands in pockets, insulated from each other.

  Blake looked up at the lodge. A light had just come on behind the stained glass window of the pantry. The staff was preparing for supper. “That’s the one I smashed through, that night.”

  “When will you drop the subject?” she said irritably.

  “I remember everything that happened, as clearly as anything in my life. For weeks I thought you betrayed me—but you weren’t there at all.”

  It had been Blake’s ingenious notion to persuade Sparta that she had never murdered Singh or the others, that those were false memories planted by the commander for reasons of his own—perhaps because he was unwilling to admit that the Free Spirit had escaped his grasp again. Blake had pleaded with her: “Why he wants you to think so, I don’t know. Maybe he killed them. But you’ve got to admit, you were out of your head. God, the amount of Bliss you were gobbling…”

  But she had destroyed his argument even before he’d well stated it. “Even if they have a way to rewrite memory, they didn’t use it on me. They didn’t even know where I was.” And in the end, Blake could not even convince himself of his implausible scheme.

  Now she was mute, insulated against his concerns, as she was insulated against his warmth.

  They walked in silence, but for the dead leaves. Gradually a solitary human shape coalesced from the shadows a dozen meters in front of them.

  They were alert, but neither of them was alarmed. Both knew how very unlikely it was that an unauthorized visitor was on the grounds. They were prepared to pass by the figure in silence—

  —but as they approached, the shadow-man whispered, “Linda.”

  The flesh on her arms crept; the cold had somehow slipped inside her parka on her whispered name. She faltered. “You…?” She was afraid to finish the question. The shadow had the shape and sound of him, but the cold wind blew his scent away, and she could no longer see in the dark.

  “Yes, darling,” said the shadow. “Please forgive me.”

  “Ohh…” She moved into his solid arms, crushed herself against him, clung to him as if she were falling.

  Blake looked on astonished and said the first natural thing that occurred to him, absurd as it was. “Where the hell have you been, Dr. Nagy?”

  Jozsef Nagy looked up, over his daughter’s shoulder. “Never far away, Mr. Redfield,”

  “Uh … call me Blake, sir.”

  “Yes, we are far from the classroom. Call me Jozsef, Blake.”

  “Right,” said Blake, but it would be a while before he got up the courage to address the most imposing authority figure of his childhood by his first name.

  “Linda, Linda,” Nagy was crooning to his daughter, who had broken into desperate sobs. “We treated you so badly.”

  “Where is Mother? Is she…?” Her words were muffled; her face was thrust into the folds of his woolen overcoat.

  “She is very well. You’ll see her soon.”

  “I thought you were both dead.”

  “We were afraid … afraid to tell you.” He glanced at Blake and nodded, and although Blake could not see him well, there was diffidence in the gesture. “We owe both of you our deepest apologies.”

  “Well, she was pretty worried,” Blake said, instantly thinking how foolish he sounded: Nagy wasn’t exactly a lost kid who’d scared his mommy. And Ellen… Linda had been beyond mere worry.

  “Yes, I know,” Nagy said simply. “There were reasons that seemed very good to us at the time. We were wrong.”

  Sparta’s sobs had subsided. She relaxed in her father’s arms. He took one arm from around her shoulders, groped in his pocket, and came up with a handkerchief. She took it gratefully. Nagy said, “I will try to explain—with Kit’s help. Perhaps we should go inside now?” The last was a question addressed to Sparta. She nodded mutely, swiping at her nose.

  The three of them started slowly up the long slope toward the lodge. Blake had had a moment to think; there was firm insistence in his voice when he spoke again, overlying a hint of anger. “It would be good if you just gave us a simple ‘why,’ sir. Now… I mean, without the commander’s kibbitzing.”

  “We are in a war, Blake. For years my daughter was a hostage. Then we realized she had become our best weapon.” Nagy hesitated as if it were an effort, but went on in a clear voice. “It proved too hard for us to let go the habits of parenthood, of teacherhood. We tried to protect both of you by controlling you. To do that we had to stay in hiding. At first only you proved difficult, Blake—finally impossible—to control.”

  “Your daughter is an adult, too.” Blake saw Nagy duck his head and suddenly understood where Ellen… Linda … had acquired her gesture of shame.

  Sparta pulled a few centimeters away from her father. “I killed them,” she said tonelessly.

  “You came to Striaphan unprepared because we failed to tell you what we had learned,” Nagy said. “Your resistance had already been largely destroyed by our attempts to hurry your dreams.”

  “The commander’s attempts,” Blake said hotly.

  “By my orders, though. To
his credit and my shame, I forced Kit to continue when he objected. I had hoped to speed your recovery, darling. Instead I…” He broke off, watching his daughter with apprehension. She had drawn away from him. “You were acting under a compulsion we knew existed but didn’t understand. Everything you did, in England and in orbit around Jupiter, was in the service of that compulsion. You tried to eliminate those who stood in your way, including those who had planted the compulsion in you.”

  “You can’t remove the guilt.”

  “I would not try. But I ask you take the next step.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “To admit that you are a human being.”

  She was weary and wounded, but she refused to weep again. “That is for me to say.”

  “So it is. Please just leave the question open until you have heard all we have to say. You too, Blake.”

  The three of them walked silently toward the massive stone house with its jewel-like windows. After a few minutes they drew closer. Linda reached to take her father’s hand. There was a renewed warmth of light in her eyes, coming from somewhere deeper than the reflections of the windows.

  There was a knock at the library door and the commander opened it a crack. A young blond steward said, “Dinner is ready, sir. Four settings, as you specified.”

  “Put it on hold. Shouldn’t be long.”

  “Sir.” The steward closed the heavy paneled door behind him.

  The commander gestured to the drinks tray. “Professor?”

  “I’ve had more than enough,” Forster said abruptly. “I don’t mind telling you, I’d hoped Troy and her friend would be able to come with me on the trip.”

  “The trip to Amalthea?”

  “Unusual expertise, between them. Might possibly supplement my own.”

  The commander regarded him with well-disguised amusement. That anyone might be able to supplement Forster’s expertise was an unusual admission for the little professor.